conspiracy theory =?= false theory

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Mark Spahn

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Jul 31, 2023, 3:24:34 AM7/31/23

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https://www.unz.com/runz/rfk-jr-vs-i-f-stone-on-the-kennedy-assassinations/

Ron Unz essays, like this one, tend to be looong. A few excerpts...

If the first two dozen pages of the Talbot book completely overturned my understanding of the JFK assassination, I found the closing section almost equally shocking. With the Vietnam War as a political millstone about his neck, President Johnson decided not to seek reelection in 1968, opening the door to a last minute entry into the Democratic race by Robert Kennedy, who overcame considerable odds to win some important primaries. Then on June 4, 1968, he carried gigantic winner-take-all California, placing him on an easy path to the nomination and the presidency itself, at which point he would finally be in a position to fully investigate his brother’s assassination. But minutes after his victory speech, he was shot and fatally wounded, allegedly by another lone gunman, this time a disoriented Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan, supposedly outraged over Kennedy’s pro-Israel public positions, although these were no different than those expressed by most other political candidates in America.

Unlike many other controversial American killings or terrorist attacks, the powerful evidence of a conspiracy in the case of the RFK assassination was physical and seemingly undeniable. Wikipedia is notoriously reluctant to promote conspiratorial narratives, but in this case the striking facts are presented with only rather weak challenges.

Around 2001 I began a project to digitize the archives of many of America’s most important publications of the past, spending much of the next decade on this effort. Unfortunately, it proved a dismal failure; few people had any interest in reading these old periodicals, so the traffic the system attracted was merely a tiny sliver of what I had originally hoped. However, during that process I’d gradually discovered that the true history of our country over the last hundred years often sharply diverged from the narrative I’d absorbed from my classes and mainstream media coverage, so the effort prompted my American Pravda series, and my archiving system proved very useful in assisting my subsequent historical investigations.

Given this massive preponderance of evidence, we can easily understand why the harsh media attacks upon Kennedy [RFK Jr] had so carefully avoided mentioning his conspiratorial beliefs regarding his father’s assassination. Such criticism would have merely brought the issue to wider public attention, and anyone who began looking into the matter would have quickly concluded that Kennedy was probably correct while our media had spent a half-century covering up the true facts of the 1968 assassination.

The two Kennedy assassinations constituted a dramatic turning point in twentieth century American history and until about a dozen years ago, I had never questioned the official story that both killings were committed by crazed lone gunmen, fully accepting the media suggestion that only crackpots and conspiracy-cranks claimed otherwise. According to his interviews and his writing, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. seems to have followed a somewhat similar trajectory, only discovering the truth about his own father’s death in 2016 when he had already reached his early 60s.

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Side note: What proportion of Americans alive today were alive when John Kennedy was assassinated, 60 years ago? The two Kennedy assassinations are now as historical as the age of John Wilkes Boothe.